


First Impressions

by madwriteson



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, Light Angst, filling in a chunk of canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:41:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21876799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson
Summary: The days between when the Urania picks Eiffel up and their arrival at Hephaestus Station, seen through Eiffel's eyes as he gets first impressions of the Urania's crew.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 55
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	First Impressions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WritingOnTheWalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingOnTheWalls/gifts).



Doug Eiffel spent his first few days aboard the Urania more or less unconscious. It was a relief, in a way, even though he didn’t know these people, even though the scattered impressions he got during his brief moments of consciousness were not particularly heartening.

SI-5, the patches on their flight suits said. SI-5 on one shoulder, and the old, familiar Goddard Futuristics patch on the other.

He hadn’t read most of his briefing materials—not that he would have remembered their contents, two years later—but he didn’t think he’d ever heard of SI-5, all the same.

“Sorry about this, but figure you’ll be better off unconscious for a bit longer,” one of the men was saying now as he hooked a new saline pouch up to the IV in Doug’s arm.

“Who...?”

“This is the third time you’ve asked that, you know. I’m starting to think you don’t like me.” He frowned at the pouch of fluids. “Looks like this is flowing all right. And it’s Daniel Jacobi.”

Doug tried to lift his hand, remembered belatedly that he was tied to the cot.

And then, he slipped back into unconsciousness once more.

“Oh, good, you’re awake.”

Doug had been staring blankly at the ceiling. Wall. There wasn’t much of a difference in microgravity, but he was still tied to a cot in what looked like a medical bay of sorts, so the wall opposite might as well be a ceiling.

It was the woman. Maxwell, that was her name. Dr. Alana Maxwell, he remembered fuzzily from when she’d first introduced herself, but he hadn’t heard either of the others call her anything but Maxwell during the times more than one of them had been in the room with him.

Not that he remembered much of that, either.

She hooked her feet through one of the bars on what was currently his floor and velcroed the tablet she’d had tucked under her arm to the side of his cot. “Now, I have some _questions_ for you.”

“Yeah?” Doug’s tongue felt too large in his mouth, and furry, in a way that reminded him unpleasantly of the aftermath of some of the benders he’d gone on back when he used to drink. “Could you get me water or something first?”

“Oh, right!” The woman kicked off the foothold, heading to the opposite side of the room to dig in a cabinet, returning a few minutes later with a pouch of a neon blue liquid that reminded Doug disturbingly of toilet water, or possibly Windex. “Gatorade,” she said, popping up the straw that was part of the package. “You’re on a steady diet of electrolyte-fortified beverages for the next little bit.”

“Great.”

If Maxwell noticed his sarcasm, she ignored it. She released his hands from their restraints and handed the pouch of liquid over. Like a giant Capri Sun with a built-in straw, Doug found himself thinking, not the first time he'd had that thought about these beverage pouches.

“So,” she said, settling down at his side again, her feet hooked back under the bar. “Tell me about your adjutant program.”

Doug took a deliberate sip of the Gatorade before answering. It tasted like... well, he didn’t really know what it tasted like. Some kind of alien fruit, maybe? “My what?”

“The MX 500-class adjutant program that runs Hephaestus Station. Sensus Unit 214. She goes by Hera, right?”

Doug eyed Maxwell suspiciously as he took another sip of the Gatorade, which was not any more palatable the second time around. “Why do you want to know about Hera?”

“ _So_ glad you asked.” She pulled the tablet off the side of the cot and turned its screen towards Doug.

He frowned at the graphs it had on its display. “What am I looking at here?”

“Hera’s error reports for your mission, or at least up to the point where the pulse beacon relay aboard the Hephaestus stopped transmitting.” She tapped the tablet and it zoomed in on a section of the graph. “Up until this point, there were the usual glitches we expect from an adjutant program’s first space mission. Perhaps a few more than average, but nothing really unusual. It always takes them some time to get used to running a space station. But here...”

Even Doug could see what must be troubling Maxwell. A massive dip... and then a sudden spike up to a level well above the previous day-to-day fluctuations. And from there, what looked like—what was, when he reached out and pinched the graph back in, revealing the rest—a steady upward trajectory until the point where the data cut off abruptly.

“I’m worried,” Maxwell said. “We haven’t had a rogue AI yet on a deep space mission, but it’s always a possibility. And given that these issues coincide with Dr. Hilbert’s mutiny... I’m worried that the damage he did might have sent her over the edge.”

“So you lot know about that, then.” Doug took another sip of the Gatorade. Maybe the flavor was growing on him?

“Only what the reports from you and Lieutenant Minkowski contained. I won’t know the extent of the damage until we’re on site. But if there’s anything you can tell me that didn’t make it into your report...” Maxwell’s voice was soft and intent, and Doug wanted to give her answers, but he didn’t know what to say to her.

“Look. All I know is Doctor Robotnik ripped part of Hera's brain out. And he said he put it back the way he found it, but I don’t know enough about this stuff to even make a guess about whether he was telling the truth.”

Maxwell sighed, half exasperated, half tired. “Well, thanks anyway.” She tucked her tablet under her arm, clearly preparing to go on her way.

“Wait!”

She paused in the hatchway, turning back to look at him. “Yes?”

“I know you said you’re worried about a rogue AI situation, but I know Hera.I don’t think she’d hurt anyone on purpose.” Doug paused and considered, thinking over the aftermath of Hilbert’s mutiny, those weeks before Lovelace had shown up on the station’s doorstep, as it were. “Well, anyone but Hilbert, at least. Pretty sure she’s still got some pent-up murderous rage RE: that whole lobotomy thing. But Minkowski and Lovelace? I just can’t see her hurting them. Not on purpose.”

Maxwell smiled, tight and anxious. “I hope you’re right.” She looked him over, her gaze resting for a moment on his still-unbound wrists. “Look, we’re about two days out from our rendezvous with the Hephaestus, assuming it’s still there. Kepler says you can have run of the ship until then. Just stay off the bridge and out of anywhere that’s locked, and don’t overdo it, all right? It’s kind of a miracle you’re still alive in the first place.”

“Sure.” The conversation with Maxwell, as short as it had been, had wiped him out. Not just because he was still recovering from his impromptu and extended trip aboard Lovelace’s shuttle, but... well, there hadn’t exactly been anyone to talk to during his brief periods outside of the cryo unit, and it turned out that other people were exhausting when you’d only had your own company for the past few months.

“Let us know if you need anything. I’m sure you can figure out the comms system.” And then she was gone.

Doug took a nap.

“Officer Eiffel. Well, isn’t it good to see you up and about.”

The drawling voice had come from behind him, and Doug started and clutched the microwaved burrito he’d scavenged from the mess hall to his chest. The burrito had still been mostly in its packaging, but he suspected that some not-insignificant amount of melted cheese had now become one with the front of the oversized flight suit he’d found clipped to the side of his cot when he’d woken up. “Hi. Colonel,” he stammered. “Kepler?” he added on a questioning tone.

The man smiled. He was grey-haired and handsome, in the way of every tv-show general who made the sort of calls that got entire armies killed. Not as old as that grey hair might indicate, Doug thought, but definitely older than Doug was. “That’s right. And you can probably stop strangling that burrito. I’m pretty sure it’s already dead.”

Doug unclenched his grip from the burrito and glanced down at the front of his flight suit, which seemed to be miraculously unscathed. “Right.”

“Anything else you need, son?”

Doug bristled a bit at that. The indulgent tone, being called son by a man who probably wasn’t even a decade his senior. It set him on edge, even if Kepler seemed to be well-intentioned. “No, I’m good.” He took a bite of the burrito and almost gagged. He had been surviving on the blandest of protein packs aboard the shuttle, and the burrito was almost too much in comparison. He forced himself to finish chewing the bite and swallow it, eying Colonel Kepler all the while. “What can I do for you?” he found himself asking. “You’ve got to have duty rotations or something on this ship, right?”

Kepler laughed. “Your job for right now is to rest and relax. There’ll be plenty to do once we reach the Hephaestus.”

Something Maxwell had said surfaced in Doug’s mind. “Are there—I mean, Maxwell said something about not having gotten transmissions from it for a while. Are you sure it’s still there?” And ignore the sudden pang in his chest at the thought of Minkowski and Hera and yes, even Hilbert, lost to the star.

A pang for Lovelace, too. For all that she’d been the reason for the predicament he’d only recently been rescued from... well. He’d liked her, during the time they’d worked together, in spite of her paranoia. He’d liked her, and she’d survived so much, and he didn’t like to think that she might have survived all of that only to die in space, no chance of ever making her way back to earth.

Kepler was talking, and Doug tried to bring his attention back to what the man was saying.

“...on long range scans now. But... they’re not responding to hails.”

“Huh.” Doug took another bite of his burrito and fought against nausea once more, though this time it had less to do with the flavor of the burrito and more to do with where his mind had just gone. Was it better or worse, thinking that the others might be floating dead aboard a station only still in orbit by chance?

Was it better or worse to think that Hera might be alone? Might have been alone, for weeks or months?

Might be blaming herself?

Kepler was smiling and saying something else that Doug didn’t hear.

“Yeah, sure,” Doug heard himself say, meaningless words meant to fill in the space. Kepler nodded and left, brushing past Doug’s shoulder on his way to wherever he was going next.

Doug floated in the hallway, contemplating, until long after his burrito was cold.

Doug had gone back to his cot in the medical bay after that, had zipped himself into the sleeping bag there, safe and secure.

That was one thing that hadn’t been in the shuttle. If there had once been a sleeping bag in there, it had been in the part of the shuttle that had blown up. What little dozing Doug had done aboard the shuttle had been while strapped to the chair in front of the comms console.

It had been miserable, trying to sleep like that.

Probably why it was so easy to doze off in an instant, now.

He woke up to arguing in the corridor outside the med bay, half-heard but obviously affectionate. A few minutes later, and Maxwell ghosted past the open hatchway, followed by Jacobi... who came into the medical bay instead.

“Hey, sorry. We wake you up?”

Doug made an incoherent noise.

Jacobi smiled, a wry little grin. “Sounds like a yes. But look, now that you _are_ awake, let me ask the world’s most awkward question: you ready to start trying to pee on your own? Because I could take that catheter out for you.”

Doug hadn’t known what to do with the catheter when he’d first woken up. He’d tucked it and the half-filled bag it was attached to into the flight suit and had tried to forget about it. “That _is_ the world’s most awkward question, thanks,” he said, buying himself some time to consider. But hey, having a complete stranger take a catheter out couldn’t be any more awkward than the various medical indignities Hilbert had inflicted on him during quarterly physicals, could it? And someone must have put it in in the first place while Doug had been unconscious, so all things considered, this man had probably already seen him naked. “Sure. It would be good to have it gone.”

“Great! Let’s get you out of that flight suit.”

It was less awkward than he’d expected. Jacobi was detached and clinical about the entire thing. Didn't ogle Doug, or at least not beyond what was necessary to remove the catheter.

Not that there was much for anyone to ogle. Doug had always been skinny, though he’d put on a little bit of padding since he’d hit his late 20s and his metabolism had slowed down a bit. But now… now his ribs stood out over a stomach that was distressingly concave given that that was where he kept his organs, now his wrists and ankles, knees and elbows were fierce bony protuberances with nothing protecting them from the slightest bump. No hair, no nails, no… well, he looked like shit, was the long and short of it.

“Now drink up,” Jacobi said, handing Doug another pouch of neon-colored liquid. This one, at least, was red and might actually be a flavor Doug recognized. “You’re going to want to down a lot of fluids, just to flush stuff out down there. Or at least that’s what the medical manual says about it.”

Doug made a face, but took the pouch. “Thanks, man.”

“No problem.”

The comms system crackled and Kepler’s voice echoed through the room. “Mr. Jacobi, could you join me on the bridge? We’re on our final approach.”

“Duty calls,” Jacobi said, pushing off. “Might want to secure yourself until we’ve got a lock on the station.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know how this works.”

Jacobi raised an eyebrow. “I really don’t think you do. Hope you learn quick.” And with that enigmatic statement, he was gone.

Doug strapped himself back into the cot.

And then?

He waited.


End file.
